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Crack-up at the Met

“I think I made a mistake,” Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, said yesterday. He thinks right. Even those who have defended Gelb’s artistic choices at the Met—I am not one of them—must have wondered at the bizarre sequence of events that unfolded yesterday: it appeared that America’s leading opera company was cracking up in public.

It began with a page-one story in the Times: Daniel J. Wakin reported that Opera News, a magazine published by the Metropolitan Opera Guild, had elected to discontinue reviews of the Met, evidently under pressure from Gelb. Fred Cohn, a regular Opera News contributor, had criticized Robert Lepage’s staging of “Götterdämmerung,” the final installment of a new production of Wagner’s “Ring,” and Brian Kellow—the magazine’s features editor and the author of an acclaimed biography of Pauline Kael—had followed up with some harsh words about the current Met regime. Because of Opera News’s affiliation with the Met, no reader has ever had the expectation that its writers are entirely free to speak their minds about the company, but a great deal of knowledgeable criticism has appeared in its pages over the years; it is the only media outlet that covers the American opera scene in anything like a comprehensive manner. For the Met to be absent from its review section would have made nonsense of the publication’s title.

A considerable Internet furor ensued. Hundreds of comments on Parterre, the leading opera blog, poured scorn on Gelb. An anonymous post on the same site compared him to Vladimir Putin. Justin Davidson, the classical critic of New York, employed a Wotan analogy and concluded that the general manager was “setting fire to the Met.” Anne Midgette, of the Washington Post, bluntly wondered if Gelb was “losing his mind.” Toward the end of the day, the Met press office, which must be ready for a long vacation, announced that the new policy had been reversed and that Opera News would continue to review the Met. “From their postings on the internet, it is abundantly clear that opera fans would miss reading reviews about the Met in Opera News,” the press release said.

It was good to see the Met correct itself so quickly. Nonetheless, the episode only intensified questions about Gelb’s fitness to lead the institution. Most of the controversy has been directed at the productions that he has mounted since arriving at the Met, in 2006. There is, however, another issue, and that has to do with Gelb’s style of management. From the start, his greatest strength has been his gift for marketing and publicity. Yet he suddenly seems unable to stop himself from engaging in behavior that generates negative stories about the Met and damages its image. His sensitivity to criticism appears to be extreme, his way of responding at once brutal and maladroit. Some might say that there is no such thing as bad publicity, but investigative stories on page one of the Times are in another category. Members of the Met board, who so far seem to have given Gelb free rein, may no longer be able to look away.

Alex Ross has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1993, and he became the magazine’s music critic in 1996.